


Before and After

by interstitial, Nonexistenz



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, Digital Art, Dubious Consent Due to Possession, Episode: s09e01 I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here, Episode: s09e04 Slumber Party, M/M, Nontraditional Canon-Divergent Soulmate AU, Supernatural Reverse Big Bang Challenge, Temporary Off-Screen Major Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-02 15:18:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16789540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/interstitial/pseuds/interstitial, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nonexistenz/pseuds/Nonexistenz
Summary: The world is black and white. Shades of gray, everyday, all the time, until you meet your soulmate. So who wouldn't long to find the soulmate fated for them, and see the world burst into beautiful, joyous color?But things are seldom as simple as they seem. The lore isn't always right, and fate isn't always kind. Sometimes finding your soulmate is only step one.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The setting for this story is canon S9 for the first half, with minor differences, and of course the soulmate overlay. The second half is future fic.
> 
> Thanks so much to my lovely artist, [Nonexistenz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nonexistenz/pseuds/Nonexistenz). I enjoyed writing this fic so very much more than I even expected, and it's a topic I probably never would have taken on without your prompt. Thank you also for being so flexible, and letting me go with some ideas that must've seemed iffy when I explained them at first. I hope this came out to your liking.

Sam is at the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. Dean is lost.

Well, not lost exactly; he and Sam just got separated in the Woodlands section and Sam hasn't been able to find him since. The trees are especially dense here, grown close along both sides of the winding gravel pathway, and Dean is Dean, and in high school, so the cover is probably too much temptation to resist. He's probably got some senior girl backed up against a peach tree with his hands up her skirt.

"Deaann!"

Signs along the trail list the common and scientific names of the plants and trees; and for the visitors who haven't met their soulmates yet, the colors of their blooms. _Prairie Sage: Salvia Azurea- dark blue to purple blossoms. Gigi Dark Pink: Chrysanthemum×Morifolium- two-tone pink and lavender blooms_. Dean is probably telling some nice girl from a good family the world looks like a rainbow now because of her.

Sam's feet scuff pebbles along the path as he walks. It's hard not to break into a jog.

"Deaann!"

Dean's been gone a long time. It's four o' clock in the afternoon, broad daylight, and it's just a field trip, and Sam has been on hunts already, real ones; a couple salt and burns, and one black dog. He's too old to be afraid of a harmless park for civilians. But Sam's hands are sweating and his heart is racing, and he knows fear well enough that he can't quite convince himself it's not what he's feeling. He can't shake the sense that something's wrong; unreal. That Dean is gone, and never coming back.

"Deeeeeann!"

"Dean is fine."

Sam spins. Behind him is a guy Sam doesn't know. He's tall and lean, runner's body, good looking. He's dressed in jeans and a henley and a black leather jacket. "Dean is on a case. An easy one. He will be home soon. Remember, Sam?"

Yeah, Sam does remember now. Dean is fine. He's on a case. Sam stayed behind at the bunker, because as Dean so aptly put it, the trials 'kicked Sam's ass to Disneyland and back'.

"Why are you wearing those clothes?"

Sam looks down. He's wearing white everything; pants, suit jacket, dress shirt, and even white loafers. He doesn't remember ever having seen them before. They're not the kind of thing he would buy.

"Because-" They're ugly, but they fit him with eerie perfection. "Um, I. Don’t know?”

The man frowns. His expression is a little wooden. Behind him, an apple tree stretches it's branches to the sky. Apples dot the ground around its trunk, red and polished shiny in the afternoon sun.

"Do you want them to be yours?" he asks.

"I-" The outfit is pretentious and ugly, and the loafers hurt his feet. "No, but..."

"You can have whatever you wish here, Sam. I want you to be happy."

Offers to make Sam happy seldom end well.

"Who are you?" he asks.

"My name is Gadreel. I am here to help you."

Sam's thoughts are dull and syrupy, running between his fingers before he can finish thinking them, and dripping uselessly on the ground. Overhead, a squirrel skitters through the branches of a huge oak tree, and acorns drop in its wake and bounce across the gravel. Sam stayed behind at the bunker, and then what happened?

"Am I dead?"

"Almost. But no, you are not."

"I uh, I'm having some trouble with my memory," Sam admits.

"It need not concern you, Sam. I will watch over your body and keep it safe while you are here."

Sam looks up at the canopy of leaves; rich, deep green against bright endless blue. Birdsong echoes through the trees. The temperature is mild. The woods are cultivated, every element planned, built, and maintained as a refuge.  
He's comfortable. He's not in pain. There are no signs of monsters, and no one is screaming in the distance. What more could a hunter ask for?

He doesn't feel safe.

-*-*-

Sam is in an abandoned diner, holding Ruby's knife. There's a body at his feet, dressed in fatigues and oozing the last of its life's blood from a jagged slice bisecting its throat. A second body is slumped against the counter, a shadowed stain darkening the chest of its camo jacket, and its head at an angle only a corpse could keep. The motionless combat boots of a third body peek out from one of the booths. Sam's dress slacks and the right sleeve of his suit jacket are an expressionist nightmare of red splatter on white canvas. His white loafers are stained bright, arterial crimson. Ruby's knife drips blood off its blade onto the filthy yellow and white tile floor.

"You could change."

It's that guy again; the one with the henley and black leather jacket.

"I can't," Sam says. "I tried."

They've had this conversation before. Sam remembers it in cloudy patches. He doesn't remember the kills he just made at all. No idea if the dead guys are monsters or vessels or Sam is just a monster now himself. "When I finished the trials, I would've been-"

"Dead, Sam. You would have been dead."

"Clean," Sam finishes. "Just me. I would've belonged to myself."

The man's mouth is flat, his eyes an eerie mix of green and blue.

"Why are you fighting me, Sam? All you need do is rest. I gave you Paradise and yet you choose this." The guy gestures expansively to indicate the cheap cafeteria style tables, the bullet riddled walls and broken window glass, the devil's trap spray painted on the floor and the yellowing poster-sized menu by the counter seating that advertises _War Pigs in a Blanket_ and _Rhoads Healthy Start._

From outside the diner, the jackhammer sound of automatic gunfire assaults Sam's ears. The man Sam's met but doesn't know advances toward him, and Sam backs away, though Sam's hand is holding a magic knife and both the man's are empty.

Sam is watching the man's eyes- something so wrong with them, too bright, too intense, brilliant green and then somehow not green enough, but something else too-

And maybe he’s watching his lips just a tiny bit, the sharp planes formed by his cheekbones, the way his leather jacket fits his body. It’s ridiculously inappropriate given the circumstances, and unlike Sam to be dwelling on, and yet it seems as if somehow they know each other intimately already.

He missteps and his heel comes down on a piece of broken chair leg. It rolls out from under his foot and he stumbles, and has to catch himself against the grimy formica counter. An apple rolls off the counter and lands in a puddle of blood by Sam's shoe.

The guy's gaze- what was his name again? Something biblical, Sam thinks- cuts to the apple. A muscle ticks in his jaw.

Sam bends down, slow and easy; picks the apple up and polishes the blood off it against the snow white front of his dress shirt.

"Tell me what's going on. What's wrong with my memory? Where are we?"

"Do not eat that, Sam."

"You're holding me prisoner, aren't you?"

"I mean you no harm."

Dean's voice calls for Sam and there's the clatter of someone running towards the door. The guy holds out his hand and inches toward Sam like he's approaching a fawn in the forest. He's close enough Sam knows the break forward to subdue him will come any second.

The apple is a firm, roundish weight in Sam's hand. It's slightly tacky against his fingers from the residue of the blood that's smeared across his shirt front now.

What the hell; it's gross, but it won't be the first time.

Sam lifts the apple to his lips, bites into it, firm flesh between his teeth, burst of tangy sweetness on his tongue. The man reaches him so fast, so inhumanly fast, that Sam barely sees him move at all. He's across the diner from Sam and then he's right in front of him. His fingers touch Sam's forehead, and blackness rushes over Sam’s vision. He swallows the bite of apple as he's falling, and the darkness takes him before he hits the ground.

-*-*-

Sam wakes up in jail.

He's sitting on a rough-hewn stone bench built into the wall of a cell so small there's no room for anything else in it, not even a bed. The man with the leather jacket and the eyes that are mostly green but sometimes blue is sitting there beside him. The honey-like sluggishness of Sam's thinking is gone. He remembers the conversation in the Garden. He remembers Dean and Death in the cabin in his dying mind too.

"You're an angel," he says.

And then: "You're possessing me?"

"Please do not attempt to eject me, Sam. You are still unwell and would only tire yourself and not succeed."

Jesus. Sam's stomach clenches painfully. What has Dean done to him? He inches over on the bench, away from the angel, much good it'll accomplish now.

"I want only what is best for you, Sam." The angel sits as ramrod straight as a soldier, and wears an expression as earnest as the social workers who used to interview Sam at school and ask him where his father was and how he got the bruises he always wore.

"And that's why you've got me in a cage?" Sam scoffs. "Because rotting in prison inside my own mind is what's best for me?"

"You wanted an explanation, so I am giving you one." The man’s eyes narrow in irritation. "I was imprisoned here until Metatron cast the angels out. I do not deny I failed in my duty, however-"

It's not a pretty place, even for a jail. Nothing but gray stone and iron bars, barely enough room to stand, not enough to lie down. The bright blank white of undifferentiated Heaven burns outside a tiny window set into the cell's back wall.

In the Garden, the angel said his name was Gadreel. It catches in Sam's memory, and he turns the vagueness of it over in his mind, polishes and works at it like a gemstone, examines it's facets while Gadreel explains his need to hide, his plans to redeem his reputation once he's stronger and Sam is well.

The Cleveland Botanical Garden. The taste of apple, crisp and delicious in Sam's mouth-

"Wait; what duty exactly?" Sam asks. "You don't mean-"

But it turns out Gadreel means exactly that. He's been in Heaven's prison since he failed to keep Lucifer out of the Garden of Eden. One angel, against Lucifer. And then millennia of solitary confinement in a cage too small for a dog.  
Sam doesn't want to feel sorry for someone who has kidnapped him, and meddled with his mind, and helped Dean betray him, and is driving his body around part-time while he's helpless and asleep.

But there it is.

"You remind me of my elder brother," Gadreel says, "wearing that."

The bright red blood is gone from Sam's bespoke white suit. It looks as perfect and cold as Sam sometimes looks to himself in his mirror.

The soulmates thing that everyone wishes for so fervently; it doesn't always happen like the textbooks claim. Some people see a dull, desaturated version of color their whole lives, and if they meet their soulmate, it brightens like a flower unfurling from its bud. For others, the black and white is true, and the bloom of color starts small; a vague tinting or a small patch of color that grows with time. Sam’s always seen a bit of color, and in Carthage, when he’d thought he saw Nick's army jacket growing a richer, deeper olive as Dean shot Lucifer point blank, he'd hoped that he was wrong. It was dark, and he wasn't sure anyhow, and it was better to ignore it.

And Hell, of course, is Hell. It was bright and vivid and full of a thousand colors of horror, each minutely different than the last- but who knows what kind of rules apply down there.

When Sam came back to the living Earth, and the sky was a brilliant blue like he’d never seen, the grass emerald green, Sam only took it well because he was missing the part of himself that mourns. When he got his soul back, the weight of the color almost crushed him.

"Thanks," Sam returns wryly. "You remind me of him too."

He points at his own chest. White shirt, yes, but under that pink skin and white bones, and under those the thunderous red of Sam's beating heart. "You're wearing the same thing he did."

-*-*-

After the reveal, Gadreel's less careful with keeping Sam under. Awake, Sam is still dull and amnesiac, but when Gadreel needs to control Sam's body and he pulls Sam under and tucks him away in a dream, he doesn't bother with keeping such a tight rein anymore. If Sam works at it, and Gadreel is sufficiently distracted, sometimes Sam can even stay close enough to the surface of consciousness to watch the world outside roll by; an unwilling tourist of his own life.

That's how he sees Gadreel resurrect Cas, and later- Sam's fingers on the pale, lifeless skin of her forehead- Charlie too.

Charlie gasps and springs bolt upright on Dean's bed. Her cheeks are a reassuring pink, and her sleek red hair swings across her shoulders when she looks around Dean's room in confusion. She says something nonsensical but charming about Christmas. The relief on Dean's face is enormous.

It occurs to Sam the uses Gadreel has put him to haven't been so bad. Maybe, objectively, Gadreel can even make better use of Sam's body than Sam can. Sam without an angel in him is good at killing, but not so hot at raising the dead.

And Sam was born, after all, to be a vessel.

"Had you done what you were born for, the world would be a wasteland," Gadreel reminds him.

They're standing in a perfect facsimile of Dean's bedroom. Interior-Dean and Charlie freeze in place as Gadreel desynchronizes the speed of events inside and outside Sam's head.

"I guess," Sam says.

Charlie’s overshirt is bright turquoise and pink. Her smile is dazzling.

The truth is there's a part of Sam that's always wanted to run; to give up hunting and its impossibilities, and hide somewhere in a college town, or with a veterinarian, or in whatever other anonymous hole in the ground he could manage to find. He always thought it was fear, or maybe pride- that young, he'd been a fool with rose-colored glasses who thought he deserved better; and older, it was a difficult habit to break. But maybe it's just the part of him that was meant to disappear so his body could house someone else.

And the rest of him is tired.

"Can you really take me anywhere?"

"No Sam, I really cannot. You know this is constructed in your mind, as a dream would be."

"Sure," Sam says. He didn't mean it literally. "But inside my head. Can I go back to Stanford, or to the Grand Canyon, or Oz?"

"Of course. Wherever you want."

Sam stops fighting.

They go to Oz.

-*-*-

Sam has been in Oz a year the first time he and Gadreel make love.

Not a real year, of course. Gadreel reports to Sam what's happening outside, and it's only been a couple of weeks. But in Sam's imaginary Emerald City, there's been plenty of time for recovery and ease.

Sam has a house inside the City walls, a block or so from the royal palace. It's mostly green of course- everything there is mostly green- with gold and eggshell accents. In the afternoon, the sun comes through the translucent luster of the emerald walls and paints rainbow pictures on the floor.

It's not a bad life. He counts not just Charlie, but Dorothy and Ozma as his friends, and Glinda granted him unlimited access to the Archives of Oz because he saved Charlie, and she and Dorothy saved Oz. Glinda calls his part "services to the Land". It was only his body that did it, not him per se, but he doesn't correct her. When the reward is the biggest library he's ever visited, it's close enough.

Gadreel comes by when he can, but he gives Sam space too, while he tools around in Sam's body, doing whatever he does. If Sam looks too hard, he can sometimes see fault lines in his picture perfect fantasy life- the seams in the fabric where Gadreel stitches the _before_ and _after_ together around the periods when Sam is back driving in the real world, placating Dean with his foggy, memory impaired presence. Mostly Sam avoids noticing.

While Sam is feeling better though, Gadreel is looking worse. He's still as impossibly attractive as ever, but there are shadows under his eyes, and frown lines at the corners of his mouth.

"What's wrong?" Sam asks. He holds Gadreel's shoulders between his hands, looks him over for evidence of ill health.

"Merely politics," Gadreel's says, and frowns. "It need not concern you."

"Okay," Sam says. He's more pliable these days.

He smooths out the line at the crease of Gadreel's lips with his thumb, cups Gadreel's cheek in his hand.

"Let's make love," he says. "I want to take care of you."

They've talked about it before, but Gadreel's had reservations. _You're my prisoner,_ he'd say, _it would be wrong._

Sam is a practical person though. Why would it be worse than all the other things Gadreel has done, or even the ones Sam's done, for that matter? He's gilded his own cage at this point, and pulled the door shut with himself inside it. Why would orgasms be worse than the Archives are?

This time, Gadreel agrees. He shrugs out of his leather jacket and hangs it on the hook beside the door. Sam takes off his suit jacket and hangs it on a hanger in the closet.

Sam nudges the bottom hem of Gadreel's henley up and Gadreel lifts his arms so Sam can take it off. Gadreel unbuttons Sam's dress shirt, and pulls it down off his shoulders, over his elbows, his wrists, drops it to the floor. They unbuckle each other’s belts, unzipper and unsnap and tug and pull on each other’s layers until they’re both standing naked.

It feels good. Free.

Gadreel’s body is beautiful in Sam’s comfortable living room, in the refracted light of Oz.

They don’t bother to move to the bedroom. Sam cards his fingers through the hair on Gadreel’s chest, runs his hands over the planes of of his pecs, down his flanks, pulls him closer by his hips.

They kiss; lightly at first, just brushes of lips. Then deeper, more passionate; open mouths, shared breaths. Sam leads. Gadreel has never-

Never anything, Sam guesses. Incorporeal; his true form imprisoned in whatever that vision of Heaven’s prison represented.

Sam is gentle. He takes his time exploring, touches and pets Gadreel everywhere he can reach. _Sam, Sam,_ Gadreel moans. He reciprocates, mirroring Sam’s hands, learning to be a lover the way he’s learning to be a person- by following Sam.

Sam brings them both down to the carpet, lays Gadreel on his back, admires Gadreel’s fair skin and the ruddy flush of his cock. He parts Gadreel’s thighs, and Gadreel goes easy, lets Sam crawl down his body, licking and sucking. Sam takes Gadreel’s cock in his mouth and sucks until Gadreel is writhing, calling his name, helpless and undone.

Sam pulls off, and moves Gadreel’s cock aside and licks behind it, over his perineum and the furl of his hole, gets him wet and sloppy. Breeches him smooth and slow. Gadreel wraps his legs around Sam and they move together, hesitant at first and out of rhythm, then stronger, more sure, so perfect they could be one body, one thought. He’s warm and tight and so, so good, so right around Sam’s cock. And he’s solid and strong under Sam’s body, his own cock a hard welcome line sliding against Sam’s abs as Sam moves. Sam’s pleasure builds, and his balls draw up tight, and Gadreel says _Sam, Sam, I can’t, I can’t-_

But it’s a fantasy, so of course he can. When he comes, Gadreel follows him over the edge immediately, trusting and easy, in this, as in everything else since the beginning of Sam’s dream.

-*-*-

And then Sam is researching ghoul behavior in the Men of Letters library, and Crowley appears in a cloud of implausibility and informs him he's possessed.

By the time it happens, he doesn't believe it. His memory is iffy again, too used to letting things go. But Crowley knows his duress word, and that shooting Sam won't hurt him, and he even knows the name of Sam's attacker.

"Wait, Sam," Gadreel pleads, hand held out in front of him. It looks familiar, and almost tender, and it makes Sam's chest ache, though he can't imagine why.

"Your brother is torturing me. Your library on Earth is the best I am capable of at the moment, but I promise-"

"Get out," Sam snarls. "Get out of my body."

A blaze of blue light rips out of Sam’s forced open mouth. Sam's strapped to a chair, wearing a crown of angel spikes that go straight through his skull and into the soft gray matter inside it. Blood drips down his forehead into his eyes, and his headache is the worst he's had since Azazel died. A sharp flare of pain stabs at him under his collarbone, where Cas burned his tattoo off his chest and forgot to heal him afterwards.

Now that Gadreel's gone, Sam remembers everything. He was possessed for months. He was shooting the shit with the Queen of Oz while Gadreel fried Kevin Tran's eyes out.

When Crowley's got all the pins out of his brain, and Dean unstraps him, he stumbles to the bathroom and retches into the toilet. He stays there for an hour, sitting on the cold tile floor and trying not to cry.

Later, when he finds out Gadreel sacrificed himself to save humanity, Sam feels nothing at all.


	2. Chapter 2

In someone else's life, that would be the end of it. But someone else isn't Sam; and in Sam's life, death is a two way street.

-*-*-

“I'm sorry,” says Feather Blavatsky, the last psychic medium in Sedona, Arizona who fits the victim profile of whatever it is they're hunting. "But we're all booked up for the month. And next month too. If you call back after that, I may be able to fit you in."

Feather is the personification of a flaky, New Age, Burning Man type. She has long, artfully messy hair with braids down one side, but not the other; and huge, dangly, dreamcatcher earrings. Her waiting room has a hot-and-cold Poland Springs bubbler with boxes of herbal tea beside it and a threadbare couch, complete with mismatched throw pillows, instead of waiting room chairs. Supposedly she's the real deal though, and that's the kind of psychic their killer is liquifying from the inside out.

Feather squints as she holds out her business card in Dean's general direction. When he takes it, she fumbles in her desk drawer, pulls out a pair of sunglasses, and slaps them on her face with a sigh of relief.

"Honestly, you'll do better seeing someone else," she says, "I specialize in soulmate location, and since you've already found each other-" She gestures vaguely between Sam and Dean.

"What? no," Sam says. "We're with the FBI. I’m David St Hubbins and this is my partner, Nigel Tufnel. We’d like to ask you a couple questions, if it’s not too much trouble."

Dean shoots him a lightly disguised version of an eye roll: _great, she's a freakin' charlatan, we're wasting our time._ They ask her their questions anyway, and advise her an unplanned vacation somewhere far away might be in order. It's all pretty routine.

She shuffles through her desk drawer some more. Pulls out one of those little, orange prescription drug bottles and pops three pills.

"Your auras are just way too bright and spiky. Worst migraine I ever had," she explains. She pushes her sunglasses out of the way, and pinches the bridge of her nose. "If there's nothing more then, Agents?"

"Uh, no, no, that's about it," Dean replies. He throws another look at Sam, and they extract themselves from her threadbare hippie sofa and get the hell out of Dodge.

"She's a nutball," Dean complains as they cross the street back to the Impala, where it waits, sleek and shining in the light of the setting sun.

"Yeah," Sam says.

"Terrible cold reader too. Pfft, soulmates. As if." Dean laughs, but his gaze slides nervously away from Sam’s.It's one of those things they don't talk about.

When Sam was a kid, and then again after Ash's bar in Heaven, when he’d notice the tinted edges of things, how his world wasn’t as purely black and white as people claimed, he’d sometimes thought, twisted as it was, that maybe Dean was his soulmate. He knows better now though. The difference between before the Cage and after is as clear and brilliant as opening the door of a darkened apartment and walking out into the noonday sun.

He climbs into the shotgun seat. Dean starts up the car, and runs his hands up and down the steering wheel, but makes no move to pull out of their parking space.

"We should still case her out," Sam says.

Dean groans in frustration, but he’s clearly in agreement.

"Monsters kill whackadoodles too," he says.

-*-*-

It's two a.m., and Sam and Dean are outside Feather's walk up apartment, idling the Impala and dying of boredom. They've gone through two double chalupa boxes, a veggie power bowl, four cokes, and a wide variety of gas station snacks; dissected (not for the first time) the plot of all the Die Hard movies, and gone on to consider whether John McClane should be trapped in a submarine or in outer space next; and argued about whether Feather Blavatsky is the name Feather was born with or not.

“Well, it’s not any weirder than Nigel Tufnel or David St Hubbins,” Dean says contemplatively.

“Dean, those aren’t our real names either; that’s exactly my point.”

Dean shrugs. “Whatever, dude. Don’t dis my man Nigel. Spinal Tap rocked.”

He has the head of a foot long gummy snake on the way to his mouth when he drops it and pops to attention. "Holy shit, I know that guy!"

Across the street, striding purposefully towards Feather’s door is a nondescript white guy with blond hair and a scruffy blond beard, wearing a dark overshirt and jeans.

“I ganked him once already. He’s a Kevorkian angel or something. S’posed to kill dying angels, but he’s got a hard on for people.” Dean scrambles out of the Impala, and Sam follows from the shotgun side.

"Hey, douchebag! Over here!" Dean shouts. He's already running across the street. Sam’s pretty sure he doesn’t have an angel blade on him.

The angel glances back at Dean, stiffens, and breaks for the door. He slams it open with his mojo so hard the top hinge breaks, and the door hangs crookedly open as he bolts up the stairs with a cursing Dean in hot pursuit.  
Sam dashes to the back of the car. The trunk jams, but he gets it open, grabs two angel blades.

The dead psychics didn't look like angel kills. There've been some problems since the Great Resurrection- some of the angels Naomi retrieved from the Empty to repopulate Heaven didn't adjust well, and a few turned their attention to their previous political quarrels on Earth or to revenge for their deaths. But this time, angels weren't even on Sam and Dean's radar.

Sam takes the stairs to the third floor two at a time, races down the hall praying under his breath that the angel is a monologer and hasn’t gone right for a smiting. Feather Blavatsky's apartment door is cracked, and Sam bursts in on a frozen tableau.

Dean is crumpled in a pile on the floor, and Sam can't tell if he’s breathing. The angel is holding Feather by the neck, while she kicks him impotently, and scratches at his hand around her throat. The angel himself is impassive.  
On the far side of the room is Gadreel.

He looks well. No different than when Sam ejected him. Or-

Calmer, maybe. Something about his posture, not so soldier-stiff; or the measured cadence of his voice.

"-not appropriate to approach the problem in this manner, brother," he's saying. "Our Father's gift of free will affects the humans in ways we do not understand. You must ask what she prefers."

Sam scrambles to Dean and crouches at his side, angel blade at the ready, though there's no way he can take two angels single-handedly.

"Dean is unharmed. He only sleeps," Gadreel reassures him.

Sam checks Dean's neck for a pulse, feels it beating strong and steady under his fingertips.

"Ask her, Ephraim," Gadreel repeats.

The angel- Ephraim- loosens his grip. Feather darts away, gasping, to Gadreel's side.

"Don't kill me, please, please, don't kill me please," she babbles.

Gadreel lays a gentle hand on her shoulder. "She is not even ill, brother. Her pain is merely the price of her gift."

Feather's teeth are chattering with adrenaline. Her hands at her throat are shaking. He hair is a disarrayed mess, and she’s lost one of her dreamcatcher earrings somehow. "He- he k-killed them, all of them, I- god, he-"

Gadreel gathers her up in his arms and she tucks her face into the front of his henly and cries.

"Go home for now, brother. You do not know the humans well enough to serve."

-*-*-

"So you two are a thing?" Dean asks, gesturing at Gadreel and Feather with his bottle of El Sol.

"Nnnooohp!" enthuses Feather drunkenly. "Jus' frens."

They're all in Feather's living room, accepting her gracious and insistent hospitality. Sam and Dean are sunk into what seems to be the long lost brother sofa to the threadbare one in her office waiting room. Feather is lying on the floor with her feet in the air, wiggling her toes. Gadreel is standing beside her, but he's leaned almost casually against one wall, more comfortable in his bearing than when Sam knew him. His jacket is off, and the lines of his chest and arms throw little dips and shadows across his henley.

Sam is having a hard time keeping his eyes off him.

"Izza- wha' was it again?" Feather asks Gadreel. She's the only one who's really drunk, a complete lightweight apparently. Or maybe the brush with death is contributing to her giddiness too.

"Barter economy," Gadreel supplies patiently. And then to Sam and Dean, "she provides me with room and board, and I act as a-"

"Spirit'al healer!"

"-heat sink for her psychic powers when they become overwhelming. Angels have fewer soulmates- often none- since we have no souls per se. Feather finds me restful, though I do have one soulmate to contend with."

Feather grins at Sam and waggles her eyebrows in a way that's strangely reminiscent of Dean when he's being crude. It makes Sam's face heat, and he's thankful most of Dean's attention is on her.

"Hang on there a minute," Dean says. "Fewer soulmates?"

" 'f course." Feather thumps her feet contentedly back down on the floor with a bang. "The soulmate business izza racket. Humans are all connected, like a giant sparkly pile of spaghetti; ugh, my head. But nob'dy wants t' know they have a billion soulmates. Wanna r'mantic fantasy."

"But the lore-" Sam protests.

"Lore shmore. Some connections 're stronger than the others, see? Lots stronger, and bang, colors. Fate or whatever, sure. But it isn't always love. What he said-" She nods her head sagely at Gadreel. "-bout 'is dad."

Gadreel pushes off the wall, turns so he's facing Sam directly. "Humans get to choose."

Feather sits up enough to take another substantial drink of her beer. She and Dean make googley eyes at each other across the coffee table.

"So if I told a fine young lady such as yourself we were destined for each other, it'd be true?" Dean asks. He's smiling his charming wolf's smile, but he's also got the twinkle in his eye that means he's just flirting, not taking it seriously.

"Yup! 'course it doesn't mean we should be t'gether. But pretending's fun too. Can't live on bread alone, and all of that."

Sam hasn't really drunk much. It's late at night and he's tired. And besides, loss of control is not so much his thing. Hasn't been in a very long time.

But he's had enough he feels warm inside. And Feather's news- it feels warm and comfortable too.

"What about angels then?" he asks Gadreel. Maybe he should be angry. Gadreel used him; there's no way around it. But the experience wasn't all bad. And Gadreel has paid. "I get to choose, but you don't?"

Gadreel gives a stiff little shrug, but maybe it's not quite as stiff as it was when they met.

"Perhaps I can learn," he says. "Sam, I am sorry. I understand if you wish to have no relationship with me."

Sam picks at a thread on his jeans. Remembers them naked and intimate, surrounded by green. "Could I have stopped you? From killing Kevin?"

Gadreel's expression is earnest, his eyes intent on Sam. "If you were not in Oz, you mean? No. Please believe me; you could not have. Perhaps you could have watched. Nothing more."

Sam let's out a long whoosh of breath. There's a moment when he thinks he _should_ have watched. But what good would it have done? Feather isn't wrong; respite is important too.

Feather and Dean are still flirting up a drunken storm. It's not privacy, exactly, but it's close enough. "Okay. Okay, good then. I. Uh, I'd like to get to know you, I think. Start over, fresh."

Gadreel smiles. Looks down at Feather's carpet, almost shy. "May I give you a gift? Nothing real; only a dream. I can’t replace what has already been your fate. But perhaps I could help in some small measure. It will take only a moment, and then you’ll awake."

Sam nods, a little hesitantly.

Gadreel comes to him, lays two fingers on his forehead. Holds them there, silent, and after a minute, Sam swallows hard, and says “Okay. Sure, go ahead.”

-*-*-

Sam and Gadreel are sitting face to face, somewhere vague and gray. The world around them is pure, stark, textbook black and white, like Sam has never quite seen, even before the Cage. Gadreel’s jacket is still black, but his hair is dark gray, his skin light gray, his eyes dull and colorless.

He’s smiling though, wide and beautiful, and when he holds out his hand, Sam takes it.

Their fingers touch and a burst of color lights up their fingertips, shines pink and delicate across the backs of their hands, travels up their wrists. Patches of color light Gadreel’s face and highlight his hair. His henley goes from almost black to black with patches of dark maroon. The sleeves of Sam’s shirt turn checkered red.

Gadreel leans in toward Sam, tilts his head, and they kiss. It’s long and lingering, and Sam closes his eyes and savors Gadreel’s taste and the feel of his mouth on Sam’s.

When they break from the kiss, Sam opens his eyes.

They’re in a garden, surrounded by trees. The sky is a brilliant blue, and the leaves are emerald green. It’s warm, and birdsong fills the air. Gadreel holds out his hand to Sam, and in it is an apple.

“Would you like it?” he asks, and Sam says _yes._

__

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, I had no idea I had a single bone in my body so romantic. I actually made myself cry for a second there at the end with the sheer level of my own schmoop. 
> 
> Thanks again to my artist, and to my readers, as well. I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing. Kudos and comments are always welcome and make me bounce around like a happy little puppy.
> 
> -
> 
> [tumblr art link](http://nonexistenz.tumblr.com/post/180668115362)


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